Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
HEGEMONY MEANS POST-POSTMODERNISM
As I walked
through the wilderness of the world, I met two daunting giants, posed on two
neighbouring mountains.
And – lo! – one
was called POSTMODERNISM and one was called HEGEMONY.
And as I
approached, POSTMODERNISM did roar at me polysyllabically and with little
style, with much hot air blowing to little purpose past my ears until I cried
as loud as I could “Stop! Stop! Make this
concession to me please. Say clearly what you really think.”
And
POSTMODERNISM laughed. And POSTMODERNISM smirked. And POSTMODERNISM pretended
that I was a person of little culture in that I could not follow his formless
outpourings. And then POSTMODERNISM spake thus;
“Fool!” said POSTMODERNISM “Do you not understand there are no
absolutes, no ultimate truths? For verily I tell you, before my dead brother
MODERNISM was, all men said that GOD knew everything and therefore GOD was
right and that was truth. But my brother MODERNISM brayed in a thousand voices
and said that all men were right, and the truth could be found in each human
heart. Since I slew my brother, I preach you the new reality – if every human
heart is right, then no human heart is right. For there is no right and wrong,
no truth and untruth. There are only truth claims. There is only the relative.
There is no absolute. So I bring you liberty. For as there is no right and
wrong, no true and untrue, then no one can lay claim to dominance. I liberate
you. I give you a world in which all respect all as none have access to the
infallible. Oh men! Oh women! Rejoice, for I lead you to a new tolerance, a new
brotherhood and sisterhood where none are right and all are respected and true
pluralism reigns in every land.”
And as
POSTMODERNISM spake, a train of relativists and postcolonial theorists danced
at his feet saying “Hosanna! Hosanna! All
are equal. All are valid. Let all cultures be respected equally. Let all know
that none is better than another. Let us live in the amity of uncertainty!”
But among them,
there were those who cried “Hosanna!
Hosanna! Your truth is no better than my truth. Your untruth is no better than
my untruth! And I say that human rights are a fiction and a fable that cannot
be supported by hard material reality, and what one society says about them is
as good or as bad as what another society says about them. So bring on torture.
Oh, bring on genital mutilation and female circumcision, for there are no
truths or untruths and all is relative and who may criticise? And behold, I say
the Holocaust never happened, for who may deny me and who dares make truth
claims to oppose me? For truly I say that which POSTMODERNISM taught.”
Whereat
POSTMODERNISM was sore wroth but knew not what to say.
But the Earth
trembled and the two mountains shook and HEGEMONY rose to his full height and
snorted flame and spoke with the clarity of a garish neon sign.
“Ha!” roared HEGEMONY in reply “Nature still abhors a vacuum. Tell all your
fairy-tales of consensus and communality; of pluralism and particularity; of
tolerance and variety. But I will speak with an older thunder.”
And he did puff
and roar so that the tree-tops swayed and the mountains quaked and
POSTMODERNISM was so abashed that he quivered and shook and then fell apart
into the thousand-and-one unstable constituent pieces of which he was made. And
POSTMODERNISM rolled, dead, to the bottom of his mountain as a heap of impotent
pebbles for the rains to scorn.
And HEGEMONY
laughed his godly laugh and said “There
never was, there is not, there never will be a society without its norms, a
people without its unexamined truths. Be they right or be they wrong, be they
relative or absolute, they are still their truths. And with the force of my
fist and the weight of my numbers, I say there has never been, is not, and will
never be a society in which all truths have equal weight. Some dominate and
those that dominate bear my name. Let those who followed dead POSTMODERNISM
think he still reigns. Let them, in their limited and exclusive individual
worlds, imagine they are free. But I say I now rule, for some truths and ideas
prevail and some do not and all are not equal.”
And as he spoke
and laughed ten million TV frontpersons and journalists and admen and
publicists and propagandists and public relations experts danced at his feet
chanting “We will drug them truly in your
name! We will let them think that they think freely as we bend them to your
will!”
And like a fist
punching my face, HEGEMONY triumphed in every land, sometimes wearing his
Cultural mask and sometimes wearing his Intellectual mask and always wearing
his Moral mask.
And in sorrow
and still seeking truth, I went my way through the wilderness.
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